Smoke Signals
Corry, John
John Corry Smoke Signals JAMES WALTON (ED.) THE FABER BOOK OF SMOKING M an and boy, I estimate, I have smoked at least 546,000 cigarettes, although I have been told to quit, and as I write this...
...But a "central premise" of his book, Walton writes, is that smoking is a "more complicated, perverse and, above all, mysterious activity than that...
...Scientists and evangelicals joined to form the British Anti-Tobacco Society in 1853, although apparently it had little effect...
...As James Walton points out in The Faber Book of Smoking, smoking, driven out of favor in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, made a comeback in the nineteenth...
...When he began his research, Walton says, he thought smoking was on its way out, but found the evidence indicated otherwise...
...Bowling alleys seeking to fill lanes with women's leagues during the day installed daycare centers and grocery services, so as not to interfere with the responsibilities of matrimony and motherhood...
...Freud's warning that "sometimes a cigar is only a cigar" is not there, but Kipling's "And a woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke" is...
...Lamb was a serious smoker...
...So, what is there about smoking that makes it so enticing, even with the health risks...
...Now he thinks smoking is here to stay...
...so was a new campaign to stamp it out...
...Smokers simply declined to give up the weed, no matter what it cost them...
...Then he ruins it with 64 pages of pretentious, academic PC claptrap...
...Russian czars sentenced peasants caught smoking to bastinado and the knout...
...Contemporary anti-smoking zealots cannot go this far, of course, although I am sure they would like to...
...Outside the home, manufacturers had a vested interest in maintaining sexual inequality so they could hire women...at wage rates far below what they would have to pay to men...
...In a chapter called "Armageddon Time," he quotes from the 1962 report by the Royal College of Physicians of London—"The number of deaths caused by diseases associated with smoking is large"—and from the American Surgeon General's report of 1964, which, he says, is "generally agreed" to be more scholarly than the British report—"The risk of developing lung cancer increases with duration of smoking and the number of cigarettes smoked per day, and is diminished by discontinuing smoking...
...Faber and Faber, 334 pages, £17.50 Radley Balko Slicing Americana ANDREW HURLEY'S DINERS, BOWLING ALLEYS, AND TRAILER PARKS: REDEFINING THE GOOD LIFE IN POSTWAR AMERICA For two hundred seventy pages, Andrew Hurley offers a charming history of three uniquely American institutions—the diner, the bowling alley, and the trailer park, sweetened with anecdotes and fascinating tidbits about the customs, architecture, and evolution of these institutions...
...whatever you think about smoking, you most likely can find something in Walton's book to amuse you...
...Censorious killjoys have always objected to smoking...
...But how long I will be able to go without smoking, I do not know, and whether I really and truly want to stop smoking, I do not know either...
...Yet Hurley's history, like the underlying reality he tries to capture, does not actually support the conclusions he draws in the book's remaining pages...
...Michael J. Hurd's latest book now available from finer on, bookstores and amazon.com THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ April 2001 89...
...As an act, it is freely chosen, and in its apparent irrationality it provokes the totalitarian spirit...
...For instance, Hurley tells in grand detail how these institutions adopted marketing plans that appealed to the upwardly-mobile ambitions of the new middle class without offending their values...
...Certainly it is a pleasurable activity, but that's not enough to explain its appeal, and neither is the usual reason put forth by the zealots.They insist, in courts and in Congress, that clever advertising turns teenagers into smokers, and so by the time they're adults they're addicted, and that's all there is to it...
...88 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ April 2001 Say now, though, that Walton has not put together a pro-smoking book, and that he has tried to be even-handed...
...One of life's small pleasures was lost, and that was only the beginning...
...THE FABER BOOK OF SMOKING M an and boy, I estimate, I have smoked at least 546,000 cigarettes, although I have been told to quit, and as I write this now, I have not had one for a week...
...The health nazis and their allies of convenience, the Leninist-liberals, are determined to rid the world of tobacco...
...Smoking no doubt is bad for one's health, but a higher consideration intrudes...
...You need not be a smoker to enjoy what he has done, although if you are a smoker, or even an ex-smoker, it will help...
...The heyday of each of his subjects was the 1950s, an era no self-regarding, tenure-seeking associate professor could risk exploring without invoking Betty Friedan, sexual liberation, and the coming counterculture...
...You may also find deep in an otherwise not very interesting Charles Lamb poem the immortal lines: "For thy sake, tobacco, I/ Would do anything but die...
...In an often repeated, even if "untraceable," story, Walton writes, Edward VII, at the first official dinner of his reign in 1901, "uttered four words which could never have passed Victoria's tobacco-despising lips: 'Gentlemen, you may smoke.'" Walton has assembled an entertaining collection of smoking stories, anecdotes, poems, and bric-a-brac here, all neatly laced together with intelligent commentary...
...You were no longer allowed to stand in the open-air stern, and watch lower Manhattan recede in the mist while smoking a cigarette...
...Light up today in a major-league ballpark, even in the bleachers, and you will be told to put it out...
...Back home again, they did not want to give them up...
...Smoking continued to grow in popularity and social acceptability, and by the turn of the century its victory was complete...
...Consider, for example, this excerpt from a 1922 article in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis by A. A. Brill: I have never seen a single neurosis or psychosis which could definitely be attributed in any way to tobacco...
...Note the pretentious "This is a smoke-free environment" signs in all the most unlikely places...
...Whatever its other pleasures, smoking upsets all the right people, and challenges the nanny state...
...To Hurley, however, these accommodations are part of some grand scheme to oppress and belittle women: Under the pretense of promoting family togetherness, they asked women to feel good about their role as self-sacrificing martyrs...
...By mid-century, smoking was once again established throughout the country...
...And so Hurley sullies his pleasing history with his uninspired, learned conclusions and lessons: Diners, bowling alleys, and trailer parks adjusted their marketing strategies to accommodate the emerging white middle class, encouraged the misery of women, fostered hatred and oppression, and otherwise put a Ward and June Cleaver face on the bloody hell of the real 1950s...
...This writer fell from abstinence, and lit up a Lucky midway through his third paragraph...
...Consequently Britain, which had imported only twenty-six pounds of cigars in 1800, imported 250,000 pounds in 1830...
...He may be right...
...It's Time To Kick Yourself (out of the nest) Dr...
...James I called Sir Walter Raleigh the "hated" father of tobacco, and eventually had him beheaded...
...On the other hand, one is more justified in looking with suspicion at the abstainer...most of the fanatic opponents of tobacco I have known were all bad neurotics...
...It spread around the globe with lightning speed, even when it was punishable by torture and death...
...I suppose he couldn't help it...
...There is no telling now how the smoking war will end, but for the time being cer- tainly the zealots are winning...
...A Mogul emperor in Hindustan once ruled that smokers were to have their lips slit...
...On the other hand, smoking wars wax and wane, and you are free to take a long view...
...Hitler, Napoleon and Louis XIV all demonized tobacco...
...Recall that Hillary Clinton's first act as First Lady was to ban smoking in the White House, and there you have it...
...Diners, in an effort to switch from servicing truck drivers and factory workers to newly affluent families, altered their interiors to mimic the family household—the exposed grill turned into a separate kitchen and owners hired motherly waitresses to bring dinner to the family...
...Mind you, though, there is nothing new about this...
...For this writer at least, the first warning came in the 1970s, when the signs went up on New York's Staten Island ferry...
...so is the note from the Starr Report on Bill Clinton's misuse of a cigar in the Oval Office...
...No matter...
...Wellington's soldiers got their hands on Spanish cigars in the Peninsula War, and found that they liked them...
...All of which seems like smart and natural market-based responses to changing demographics...
Vol. 34 • April 2001 • No. 3
